0:02Skip to 0 minutes and 2 secondsHello, my name is Luis Fernandez Luque. I am researcher at Norut. It's a research institute in Tromso, Norway. And in today's lecture, I am going to speak about the role of mobile health, the data in social media.

0:19Skip to 0 minutes and 19 secondsFirst, I am going to introduce a little bit the new concept around xHealth. Also, later on we will be studying several cases which are very interesting to illustrate the topic. We are going to speak about diabetes communities, about anorexia and pro-anorexia communities. Also, the challenges around communication both in vaccination and Ebola. And finally, we will address the discussion. As you can see in this slide, global social media is something very common everywhere in the world. But you need to take into account that each country may have different type of a social media channel. For instance, in continental China, you have other networks than in Taiwan. Also, in Japan and in Russia.

1:12Skip to 1 minute and 12 secondsBut pretty much all the American social media platforms are the most popular everywhere, especially Facebook and YouTube. Why is very important, social media, nowadays? There are more than 40% of the worldwide population already connected to the internet. And this is growing rapidly, especially in the developing countries, mainly because the widespread use of mobile phone is bringing also the internet nowadays with mobile connections. This letter is from the International Telecommunication Union. Here, just as a sample, you can see the top websites in Uganda and also in Norway. It's very interesting to see that YouTube is very popular in both countries, and also Facebook. So the social media use tends to be quite common all over the world.

2:09Skip to 2 minutes and 9 secondsAlthough, it's always adapted to the different cultures. And if this is the case from our point of view, it shouldn't be a surprise how social media is actually a storm in the health domain. In that graph that you see in the upper corner, you can see how many hospitals have been adopting YouTube and Twitter in the US by the year 2010. So already five years ago. Very quickly, it start in less than three years from few hospital, maybe 20 hospital in YouTube. In the year 2010, it grow to 400 hospitals. And that's a huge amount of videos. Not only hospitals are making videos in YouTube, but also regular user, patients, telling how they live with HIV, multiple sclerosis, diabetes.

3:15Skip to 3 minutes and 15 secondsThere is a wide community of individuals using social media to communicate. There are also health ministries. For example, in Ecuador in South America, they used YouTube to reach to the public. And the set of tools we have in the health domain that we can use social media is so huge that even the CDC are making guidelines how to use social media for health communication. There is also a problem right now with the terminology. What we mean by health social media? What is Health 2.0? What is Medicine 2.0?

4:03Skip to 4 minutes and 3 secondsThose terms, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0, have been evolving in the last 10 years quite a lot. Because it's a very immature area of research, still many thing needs to be done, and the term have been evolving. In the beginning, like seven years ago, it was pretty much the use Facebook, forums, and those social media channels in the health domain. But nowadays, when we speak about Health 2.0, we also mention that it is about participatory medicine. It's about the new role of patients using the internet to be more empowered equate in the decision making. So it's more about the change of roles, and the new paradigm medicine, which is a participatory medicine. So it's very intermingled.

4:57Skip to 4 minutes and 57 secondsHere is a slide about Medicine 2.0/3.0. We can see a little bit the real ambition about Medicine 2.0 that Professor Gunther Eysenbach had already in the year 2008. Health 2.0 or Medicine 2.0 as he defined, was the combination of many different tools. From the consumer point of view, you had the professional communities. Then you have also the Science 2.0, researchers sharing data, citations, also tracking epidemics with HealthMap, for example, open publication peer review. And then you have to also professional communities for doctors or nurses. Like for instance, SERMO. And also, you have the personal health records, the interact patients and their profession in a more social way. A very good example is Google Health.

6:01Skip to 6 minutes and 1 secondAnd then you also have the HealthVault from Microsoft. And all those directory system of tools, a user. At the end, what they are promoting is participation, openness, collaboration, and apomediation. Apomediation Apomediation means that the patient, they don't need anymore just the doctor as the gatekeeper to the medical knowledge. So we are bypassing the gatekeeper to get knowledge directly from our patient point of view. Another very wide trend is the use of mobile health for promoting health. There are many example of diabetes applications. Also in cardiovascular disease and cancer. And the main advantage is that with the mobile phone, you have access to tools, services, and knowledge in your pocket.

6:59Skip to 6 minutes and 59 secondsSo at the point of need, you can just go to your mobile phone. That's something quite new that traditional computers don't have. Also nowadays, we have to take into account the incorporations of smart watches and smart clothing within the mobile health environment. And just as an example of how common is becoming the use of mobile technology, there have been already letters in The Lancet explaining about pain in the fingers because of overuse of mobile phones. This is a little bit an addiction in many countries, especially in Asia, that can have also health consequences.

Welcome to Week 2: Health 2.0

This week, our guest educator, Dr. Luis Fernandez-Luque, will share several case studies regarding the influence of social media in healthcare context. Luis has been involved in eHealth and Medical Informatics research for over 10 years. He has more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and is chairman of the IMIA Social Media WG. He is also a researcher at NORUT, a research institute in Tromso, Norway.